Sanjib-da,
If I am not wrong the 100,000 people killed since 1989 in Kashmir and Jammu are
by the jehadis -only a handful of jehadis are actually getting killed by armed
forces --see Mr Mushraff's occupation of Kargil in 1998 which got resolved
after death of 2500 Indian soldiers and intervention of Bill Clinton .
Hence, cannot it be assumed that the army is actually trying to identify
jehadis - by making youth carry IDs so that the real jehadis cannot take lives
- I would support such measures in USA or UK or elsewhere as well.
Umesh
kamal deka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Does India have a state called Kashmir ?
If I am not seriously mistaken,the name of the state is Jammu and Kashmir that
comprises of three distinct zones---Ladakh ( Buddhist-majority), Jammu (
Hindu-majority) and Kashmir valley ( Muslim-majority).I don't see similar
uprising in Ladakh and Jammu.Ain't those two regions part of the state,known
as J&K ? Shouldn't the point of view of those people,living in that two regions
be heard ? Why must anyone force the choice of one segment of the state's
population upon others ? Should we assume that the people of Ladakh and Jammu
are not KASHMIRIS ?
KJD
On 10/5/07, Sanjib Baruah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There is a provocative new documentary film on Kashmir. The following
review in Outlook magazine may be of interest to Assamnet.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20071004&fname=ananya&sid=1&pn=1
October 12 2007..
Azadi: Theirs And Ours
By the logic of the Indian state, India is free and Kashmir is a part of
India, ergo, Kashmir too, must be free. But Sanjay Kaks documentary
provides visual attestation for something diametrically opposed to this
logic: the reality of occupation.
Sanjay Kaks new documentary Jashn-e-Azadi ("How we celebrate freedom") is
aimed primarily at an Indian audience. This two-part film, 138 min long,
explores what Kak calls the "sentiment", namely "azadi" (literally
"freedom") driving the conflict in the India controlled part of Kashmir
for the past 18 years. This sentiment is inchoate: it does not have a
unified movement, a symbol, a flag, a map, a slogan, a leader or any one
party associated with it. Sometimes it means full territorial
independence, and sometimes it means other things. Yet it is real, with a
reality that neither outright repression nor fitful persuasion from India
has managed to dissipate for almost two decades. Howsoever unclear its
political shape, Kashmiris know the emotional charge of azadi, its ability
to keep alive in every Kashmiri heart a sense of struggle, of dissent, of
hope. It is for Indians who do not know about this sentiment, or do not
know how to react to it, that Kak has made his difficult, powerful film.
And it is with Indian audiences that Kak has already had, and is likely to
continue having, the most heated debate.
Between 1989 and 2007, nearly 100,000 people--soldiers and civilians,
armed militants and unarmed citizens, Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris--lost
their lives to the violence in Kashmir. 700,000 Indian military and
paramilitary troops are stationed there, the largest such armed presence
in what is supposedly peace time, anywhere in the world. Both residents of
and visitors to Kashmir in recent years already know what Kaks film brings
home to the viewer: how thoroughly militarized the Valley is,
criss-crossed by barbed wire, littered with bunkers and sand-bags, dotted
with men in uniform carrying guns, its roads bearing an unending stream of
armoured vehicles up and down a landscape that used to be called, echoing
the words of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, Paradise on earth. Other places
so mangled by a security apparatus as to make it impossible for life to
proceed normally immediately come to mind: occupied Palestine, occupied
Iraq.
Locals, especially young men, must produce identification at all the
check-posts that punctuate the land, or during sudden and frequent
operations described by the dreaded words "crackdown" and "cordon and
search". Kaks camera shows us that even the most ordinary attempt to cross
the city of Srinagar, or travel from one village to another is fraught
with these security checks, as though the entire Valley were a gigantic
airport terminal and every man were a threat to every other. As soldiers
insultingly frisk folks for walking about in their own places, the
expressions in their eyes--anger, fear, resignation, frustration,
irritation, or just plain embarrassment--say it all. In one scene men are
lined up, and some of them get their clothes pulled and their faces
slapped while they are being searched. Somewhere beneath all these daily
humiliations burns the unnamed sentiment: azadi.
One reason that there is no Indian tolerance for this word in the context
of Kashmir is that the desire for "freedom" immediately implies that its
opposite is the case: Kashmir is not free. By the logic of the Indian
state, India is free and Kashmir is a part of India, ergo, Kashmir too,
must be free. But Kaks images provide visual attestation for something
diametrically opposed to this logic: the reality of occupation. Kashmir is
occupied by Indian troops, somewhat like Palestine is by Israeli troops,
and Iraq is by American and coalition troops. But wait, objects the Indian
viewer.
Palestinians are Muslims and Israelis are Jews; Iraqis are Iraqis and
Americans are Americans--how are their dynamics comparable to the
situation in Kashmir? Indians and Kashmiris are all Indian; Muslims and
non-Muslims in Kashmir (or anywhere in India) are all Indian. Neither the
criterion of nationality nor the criterion of religion is applicable to
explain what it is that puts Indian troops and Kashmiri citizens on either
side of a line of hostility. How can we speak of an "occupation" when
there are no enemies, no foreigners and no outsiders in the picture at
all? And if occupation makes no sense, then how can azadi make any sense?
Kak explained to an audience at a recent screening of his film in Boston
(23/09) that he could only begin to approach the subject of his film,
azadi, after he had made it past three barriers to understanding that
stand in the way of an Indian mind trying to grasp what is going on in
Kashmir. The first of these is secularism. Since India is a secular
country, most Indians do not even begin to see how unrest in any part of
the country could be explained using religion--that too what is, in the
larger picture, a minority religion--as a valid ground for the political
self-definition and self-determination of a community. The Valley of
Kashmir is 95% Muslim. Does this mean that Kashmiris get to have their own
nation? For most Indians, the answer is simply: No. Kashmiri Muslims are
no more entitled to a separate nation than were the Sikhs who supported
the idea of Khalistan in the 1980s. Such claims replay, for Indians, the
worst memories of Partition in 1947, and bring back the ghost of Jinnahs
two-nation theory to haunt Indias secular polity and to threaten it from
within.
The second barrier to understanding, related to the struggle over
secularism, is the flight of the Pandits, Kashmirs erstwhile 4% Hindu
minority community, following violent incidents in 1990. 160,000 Pandits
fled the Valley in that years exodus, leaving behind homes, lands and jobs
they have yet to recover. Today the Pandits live, if not in Indian and
foreign cities, then in refugee settlements that have become
semi-permanent, most notably in Jammu and Delhi. For Indians, even if they
do little or nothing to rehabilitate Pandits into the Indian mainstream,
the persecution of the Pandits at the hands of their fellow-Kashmiris,
following the fault-lines of religious difference and the
minority-majority divide, is a deeply alienating feature of Kashmirs
conflict. Kashmirs Muslim leadership has consistently expressed regret for
what happened to the Pandits in the first phase of the struggle for azadi,
but it has not, on the other hand, made any serious effort to bring back
the exiled Hindus either. In failing to ensure the safety of the Pandits,
Kashmir has lost a vital connection with the Indian state--and,
potentially, a source of legitimacy for its claim to an exceptional status
as a sovereign entity.
The third major obstruction to India taking a sympathetic view of Kashmir
is the problem of trans-national jihad. Throughout the 1990s, Kashmirs
indigenous movements for azadi have received varying degrees of support,
in the form of funds, arms, fighting men, and ideological solidarity, not
only from the government of Pakistan, but also from Islamist forces all
across Central Asia and the Middle East. The reality of Pakistani support,
and the presence of foreign fighters, from an Indian perspective, damages
the claim for azadi beyond repair.
Kashmiri exceptionalism in fact has an old history.
Yet even if we do not want to go as far back as pre-modern and colonial
times, then at the very least right from 1947, Kashmir has never really
broken away completely like the parts of British India that became
Pakistan, nor has it assimilated properly, like the other elements that
formed the Indian republic. The status of Kashmir has always been
uncertain, in free India. But with the involvement of pan-Asian or global
Islamist players, starting with Pakistan but by no means limited to it,
the past gives way to the present.
India no longer deals with Kashmir as though it were still the place that
was ruled by a Hindu king until 1947 and never fully came on board the
Indian nation in the subsequent 50 years. It now looks upon Kashmir as the
Indian end of the burning swath of Islamist insurgency that engulfs most
of the region. In quelling azadi the Indian state sees itself as engaged
in putting out the much larger fires of jihad that have breached the walls
of the nation and entered into its most inflammable--because
Muslim-majority--section.
Secularism, the Pandits and jihad are all very real impediments to India
actually being able to see what is equally real, namely, the Kashmiri
longing for azadi. Kak explained to his viewers that to be able to portray
azadi from the inside, he had to get through and past these barriers, to
the place where Kashmiris inhabit their peculiar and tragic combination of
resistance and vulnerability, their dream of a separate identity and their
confrontation with an overwhelmingly powerful adversary. Their misery is
palpable but they have yet to find a politics adequate to transform
dissatisradise. Here the sadhus in saffron robes arrive, on their way to
the holy shrine at Amarnath, on their annual pilgrimage, invoking, in the
same breath, the Hindu god Shiva and the Indian flag, the "tiranga"
("tri-colour"). You cannot take away what is ours, say these people. Ah,
but you cannot keep what was never yours, either. India for Indians;
Kashmir for Kashmiris: this is the fugitive logic that the filmmaker is
seeking to make explicit.
Kak has set himself a nearly impossible task. He must take Indians with
him, on his difficult journey, past their prejudices, past their
suspicions, past their very real fears, into the nightmarish world of
Kashmiri citizens, torn apart between the militants and the military,
stuck with the after-effects of bombings, mine-blasts, crackdowns,
arrests, encounter killings and disappearances that have gone on for
nearly two decades without pause.
I became interested in Kashmir at the same time, for the same reason, that
Kak began his investigations: the trial of S.A.R. Geelani, accused and
later acquitted in the December 13, 2001 Parliament Attack case. In 2005 I
wrote a couple of articles about Geelani, a Kashmiri professor of Arabic
and Persian Literature at Delhi University, for this and other Indian
publications. These earned me denouncements as anti-national, self-hating,
anti-Hindu, pro- Pakistani, crypto-Muslim, etc. One letter to the editor
even called me a terrorist! Kak has already had a taste of this reaction
since the release of Jashn-e-Azadi in March, and must expect more of it to
be coming his way in the next few months, as his film is shown widely in
India and abroad. In fact, he is sure to get more flak that I ever got,
given he is a Kashmiri Pandit.
Aggressively Hindu nationalist, right-wing Pandit groups find Kaks empathy
for Kashmiri Muslim positions infuriating, a "betrayal" that enrages them
much more than that of a merely (apparently)
Hindu--non-Pandit--sympathizer like myself. But like Israeli refuseniks,
there is reason to believe that now India too has its own nay-sayers, who
cannot condone the presence of the Indian armed forces in Kashmir or the
continued refusal of the Indian state to engage with Kashmiris on the
question of azadi. Kak himself makes the comparison to Palestine by
calling the azadi movement of the early 90s "Kashmirs Intifada".
What allows someone like me--born, raised and educated in India, secular,
committed to the longevity and flourishing of the Indian nation in every
sense--to get, as it were, the meaning, the reality, and the validity, of
Kashmirs agonized search for azadi? Why do I not want my army to take or
keep Kashmir by force, or my fellow-citizens to enjoy their annual
vacations as unthinking, insensitive tourists, winter or summer? Why do
abandoned Pandit homesteads affect me as much as charred Muslim houses,
and why do I think that neither will be rebuilt and re-inhabited, nor will
they be full of life as they once were, unless first and foremost, the
military bunkers are taken down?
The answer comes from my own history, the history of India.
If ever there was a people who ought to know what azadi is, and to value
it, it is Indians. 60 years ago India attained its own azadi, long sought,
hard fought, and bought at the price of a terrible, irreparable Partition.
My parents were born in pre-Independence India, and to them and those of
their generation, it is possible to recall a time before azadi.
Kaks film incorporates video footage from the early 1990s, taken from
sources he either cannot or will not reveal. In those images of Kashmiris
protesting en masse on the streets of Srinagar, funeral processions of
popular leaders, women lamenting the dead as martyrs in the path of azadi,
terrorist training camps, the statements of torture victims about to
breathe their last and BSF operations ending in the surrender of
militants, the seething passions of nationalism come right at you from the
screen, leaping from their context in Kashmir and connecting back to the
mass movements of Indias long struggle against British colonialism, from
1857 to 1947. No Indian viewer, in those moments of collective and
euphoric protest against oppression, could fail to be moved, or to be
reminded of how it was that we came to have something close to every
Indian heart: our political freedom, our status as an independent nation,
in charge of our own destiny. The irony is that azadi is not something we
do not and cannot ever understand, but that it is something we know all
about, intimately, from our own history. What frightens us is not the
alien nature of the sentiment in every Kashmiri breast: what frightens is
its familiarity, its echo of our own desire for nationhood that found its
voice, albeit after great bloodshed, six decades ago.
The British and French invented modern democracy at home, but colonized
the rest of the world. The Jews suffered the Holocaust, but Israel
brutalizes Palestine. India blazed the way for the decolonization of
dozens of Asian and African countries, and established itself as the
worlds largest democracy, yet it turns away from Kashmir and its quest for
freedom, and worse, goes all out to crush the will of the Kashmiri people.
Indians with a conscience--and perhaps Kaks film will help sensitize and
educate many more, especially the young--ought not stand for this
desecration of the very ground upon which our nationality rests. After
all, we learnt two words together--"azadi" and "swaraj", freedom and
self-rule--and on these foundations was our nation built.
We are a people who barely two generations ago not only fought for our own
freedom--our leaders, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and so many others, taught
the whole of the colonized world how to speak the language of self-respect
and sovereignty. We of all people should strive for a time when it will
become possible for a Kashmiri to offer a visitor a cup of tea without
rancour or irony, as a simple uncomplicated expression of the hospitality
that comes naturally to those who belong to this culture. We should join
the Kashmiris in their search for a city animated by commerce and
conversation, not haunted by the ghosts of the dead and the fled. We
should support them, whether they be Muslims or Hindus, in turning their
grief, so visible in Kaks courageous work of witnessing, into a genuine
"jashn", a celebration, of a freedom that has been too long in the coming.
Anything less would make us lesser Indians.
________________________
Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New
Delhi (2005-2008)
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Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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